head to head · open source
huginn vs hl
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars, 4,299 forks, 698 open issues and last shipped today. hl has 3,289 stars, 66 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. huginn leads on adoption by 1,419% (49,969 vs 3,289 stars). huginn is written in Ruby under MIT; hl is written in Rust under MIT. huginn has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, hl 2%. huginn was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| huginn | hl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 3.3K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 66 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick huginn if
- You weight community size — 50K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick hl if
- You want the hl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and hl fits your workflow better
About huginn
Huginn is an open source system for building agents that perform automated tasks online, written in Ruby and released under the MIT license. Its agents read the web, watch for events, and take actions on the user's behalf. Internally, agents create and consume events that propagate along a directed graph, which means one agent's output becomes another agent's input and a chain of small steps can be composed into a larger workflow. The project lives in the Ruby ecosystem and is distributed as an official Docker image or installed locally from a forked repository.
read the full huginn overview →
About hl
hl [![Build Status][ci img]][ci] [![Coverage Status][cov img]][cov] [![Release][release img]][release] High performance log viewer and processor that transforms logs in JSON and logfmt formats into a human readable output. Built with efficiency in mind, it enables quick parsing and analysis of large log files with minimal overhead. Features overview Automatic Pager Integration : Automatically integrates with a pager for enhanced convenience, defaulting to less if available, but fully supporting any compatible pager. Log Streaming Mode : Enable log streaming with the P flag, which disables the pager. Field Based F…
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Frequently asked questions
Is huginn or hl more popular?
huginn has 49,969 GitHub stars and hl has 3,289. huginn has the larger community by that measure.
Are huginn and hl free?
Both are open source. huginn is licensed under MIT and hl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between huginn and hl?
huginn is written in Ruby and hl in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, huginn or hl?
Choose huginn if you want the larger community (49,969 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose hl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.